Certainly a monumen that’s one of its kind, of great importance for the knouledge of the funeral customs of the epoch. Begun in Luxor of Luxor, in 1996, by the Italian archaeological mission, they are directed by Francesco Tiradritti. The careful restoration has revealed the story of the tomb, its vastness and magnificence, and now it’s one of the greatest funeral monuments in Egypt. “Certainly twenty years of work will be necessary” Tiradritti has explained on the tenth anniversary of the excavations, illustrating a rich reportage and explaining the difficulties faced during the works but also the extraordinary finds. “Harwa ordered to excavate his own sepulchral in the plane of Assasif, on the western banks of Luxor”. Tiradritti has told – before the queen Hatshepsut’s temple.

With its area of 4500 m2 it’s one of the biggest private tombs of ancient Egypt, where the four underground levels reach a depth of 25 m. From the end of the new reign, in the XI century BC, the Egyptians had begun to bury their dead in tunnels excavated in the stone without any decorations. After almost three-hundred years, Harwa takes up again the interrupted tradition of the monumental tomb, building one that surpassed for vastness all the ones that the sovereigns of the previous epochs had excavated in the valley of the kings. Today the tomb is in the middle of a vast necropoli. Harwa didn’t complete it, but his successor, Akhimenru, enlarged the northern part of the corridor that surrounds completely the first underground level to obtain a sepulchral. It was then changed, in Tolomeica epoch, to a sanctuary. A partico entrance, a hall, two hypostyle chambers, Osiride’s sanctuary, a corridor that leads to Padineith’s tomb, a series of chambers and 14 funeral pits. The rooms that form the tomb are nine, each one of which marks Harwa’s passing from life to re-birth, passing the time, through death. Everything according to a precise project. “For the first time in the Egyptian history – Tiradritti continues – the decorations tell about man’s journey from life to death and from death to eternal life”.

The culmination is touched by the relief that represents, through an allegory, the death. Harwa, represented as an old man with a prominent stomach, a falling bosom and a double chin, is led to the afterlife by god Anubi. The man of divinity grasps firmly the man’s one, who instead keeps his fingers stretched, almost as if he is trying to escape and free himself from that inescapable grasp.

Harwa’s eternal destiny is completed reaching god Osiride, king of the dead, who’s image is sculptured in the high-relief on the far wall of the sanctuary, that ends the succession of the rooms of the first underground level. Osiride’s figure is characterized by an optical illusion, the trompe – l’oeil. The god’s image, of small size, is visible from the entrance to the first underground level of the tomb, from where it appears more distan from what it actually is, almost as if to postpone the encounter with Osiride and the painful moment of death.
 

Osiride's sanctuary

Photo from   La Tomba di Harwa